


The Sandover Way:  A Guide to Proactive Management Techniques

by facetofcathy



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 1000-3000 words, Episode Related, Incest, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-04-01
Updated: 2009-04-01
Packaged: 2017-10-02 06:54:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/facetofcathy/pseuds/facetofcathy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The three steps to effective management, Sandover style.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sandover Way:  A Guide to Proactive Management Techniques

**Author's Note:**

> Tag to 4.17, It's a Terrible Life

**1\. Self Realization as the Key to Self Actualization: Furthering Employee Motivation and Development**

"So I smashed the shit out of my phone," Sam said.

Dean didn't take his eyes of the road. "You mean while you were still fucked up on angel dust?"

Sam nodded, didn't even crack a smile, because with Dean, encouragement only led to escalation, a lesson he'd learned when he was seven. "Cubical rage," Sam said, and he could feel the damn tension headache coming back.

"If somebody made me wear a yellow shirt everyday, I'd go postal too."

"Two words for you, dude, power suit."

"Yeah, yeah. Fuck that apartment was nice though, had this awesome bed, and these sheets that felt like, man, I don't even know."

"My place sucked." Sam dug around in the bag at his feet and pulled out a bag of chips. Dean dug his hand in and crammed a fist-full in his mouth. He still claimed he was hungry all the time. "The bed was too short, there was no cable and no internet and the only book in the place was Dante's _Inferno_—in Latin."

"What'd you do?"

"Practiced my Latin until I figured out how to jack into the neighbour's Wi-Fi."

Dean drove in silence for a few miles, and Sam finished off the chips, wiped his hands on his jeans and wished for a fifth of tequila. Fuck it, next gas station, he was buying some. They'd got themselves out of the Sandover building and into the car and pointed down the road on the strength of years of habit, but they hadn't turned any clocks back. Dean had given him a sketchy account of his encounter with Zachariah, but Sam wasn't fooling himself that he'd got the full story or that things were suddenly okay between them. He wasn't sure he remembered what okay looked like.

Dean pulled off the highway at the next exit and drove down a few random streets. He parked under a tree in front of a row of identical houses. The streets were deserted, middle of the day and no one home, or at least no one venturing away from their electronics.

"What was the point of that?" Dean said, staring through the windshield like he was still driving. "I mean," he said, before Sam could say a word, "beyond the weird-ass motivational speech, what was the lesson there? It could be worse, Dean, you coulda been a yuppie?"

Sam laughed, came dangerously close to a snort. "Proves how far from the mortal plane those guys are. I don't think you're yuppie material."

"No?"

"Fuck no, gotta be dumb enough to buy your own hype for that. Trust me, I met enough of them at Stanford. Makes about as much sense as me as a cubical drone."

"Yeah, obedience never has been your thing."

Sam didn't rise to the bait. He knew he liked to make his own mind up, and he wasn't going to change. Dean on the other hand— "You falling in line, Dean?"

"What the hell does that mean?"

"You always did with Dad, fell in line. That's what the angels thought they were getting, right? The good soldier."

"I always knew what Dad's endgame was—knew why I was on board."

"True," Sam said, and it was true as far as it went, it had just never been enough for him.

"He said something."

"Zachariah?"

"Yeah, him. Been bugging me."

Sam wished he could tell Dean to move this conversation to a bar, that it would go down better with a couple of shots and a couple of beers, but beyond the fact that it was ten in the morning, he figured this was happening now or not at all, so he kept his mouth shut and he waited.

"He made some crack, and I never thought I'd miss Castiel's whole sourpuss thing, but wisecracking angels are too weird, man. He said something about driving a cool car and fornicating with women."

"He said that? Fornicating?"

"Yeah, like he was laying out the job perks, you know—no insurance, no retirement plan but all the tail you—"

"Okay, Dean I get the picture."

"No, I don't think you do," Dean snapped. "It was creepy, like, like, I don't know—it's not like those guys show any respect for people, anyway, but—"

"You mean, he was talking about the women like they were things, not real people, just a reward for a job well done?"

"Yeah," Dean said with real, evident distaste.

"God's not a feminist, but you are?"

"Doesn't seem possible, does it?"

"I know what you're like." Sam couldn't help but know, they'd lived too tightly wrapped together for there to be those kinds of unknowns.

"I've never—I'm not...fuck it, Sam, I'm not some user. I only ever—"

"Dean, I get it, okay." Sam sighed. "So he said, fornicate with women, yeah? Never mentioned all the guys?"

"Not a word."

"So you think that means they don't know, or they don't approve, or what?"

"Maybe they don't consider fucking guys a perk."

"Do you?"

"Hell yeah, I mean, come on, Sam. If things had been different, and we'd grown up all nuclear family in Lawrence, do you think I ever would have, you know...."

"Discovered the joys of bisexuality?"

"Fuck off," Dean said and hit him in the arm, hard, but he was smiling.

Sam considered it; he'd never looked at it that way before, walking in on Dean in bed with a guy was just something that happened sometimes, just like walking in on him with girls did. Granted, Sam had been surprised when he'd enrolled in high school after high school to discover that not everybody was like Dean. He'd had to go looking for someone to lose his guy virginity with. Guys hadn't shown up leaning against his locker and smiling up at him half nervous, half bold the way the girls did, once he'd gotten a little taller than them, at least.

So, if Dean hadn't grown up on the road what would he have become? "They really did get the yuppie thing all wrong, you never would have been a power-suit guy," Sam said. Dean would have been the guy with the pretty wife and the kids and the dog, and he likely would have loved it, been happy.

"Naw, you maybe."

"You saying I'm dumb enough to buy my own hype?"

"I'm saying you're stubborn enough to keep on trying even when you see how futile it all is." Dean sounded a little proud of him, fond of his stubborn heart.

"Yeah, well...."

"What would you have been?" Dean said quietly, like maybe he didn't think he had the right to ask.

"Not a lawyer," Sam said with certainty.

"No?"

"No, I—you know Dean, probably a fucked up teen-aged runaway, because in no world, no matter how nice," Sam gestured out at the houses, "would I have ever got along with John, never explain an order, Winchester. Dean," Sam turned and waited until Dean looked at him, "I stuck it as long as I did, because I couldn't imagine not being with you."

"Then what the hell are you doing now, Sam?" Dean asked, and Sam looked away. "I feel like you've already left, you just haven't told me yet, just like the last time."

"I'm not, Dean. I'm not. But I can't wait for you to give me permission to grow up, either."

"How is this growing up? This, what you're doing, is riskier than anything either one of us ever did as kids, or since. Jesus, Sam, how many times do you want to tempt them into killing you?"

Sam turned back, watched Dean watching him. "My gamble to make," he said, trying to decide how far to go, how far to push Dean. "Kind of like consigning yourself to hell was yours," he said, "I'm tired of your disapproval, Dean. I made my choices and I'm living with them, and I'm also tired of you dancing on the end of an angel's string and expecting me to join you. If they were really going to stop me from making myself a weapon, they would have done it by now."

Dean swallowed, said, "Funny you should mention that. I've been thinking ever since we got out of the matrix that you get straighter talk out of a crossroads demon than you do out of an angel."

"Yeah, well. Just—what do you want to do, Dean?"

"Huh, no one ever asks me that. I never said I wanted to stop being a hunter. I just don't want to carry the flaming sword of heaven into battle and do any more of their dirty work for them."

"Yeah, nothing like someone wanting to put you up on a throne you don't want to get your back up." Sam let Dean stew for a while. They were either driving away from here together or they weren't.

"Sammy," Dean said, thoughtfully, "if you were in the woods hunting a, whatever, a wendigo, and the thing was trying to herd you in a particular direction, what would you do?"

"Double back and flank it."

Now Dean was grinning, his evil shit-eating fuck-you grin. "Yeah, and if there was a werewolf in the next valley over?"

"Worked the once, with Anna," Sam said and grinned back.

"Yeah, it did. Why don't we load up on supplies, find ourselves some nice, simple salt-and-burn jobs, get the juices flowing, and then see if we can't find a way to manoeuvre our friends and our enemies into the same room again."

"Yeah, Dean, let's do it," Sam said, relieved that Dean had found some way to move forward together.

Dean put the car into gear, pulled out onto the street and squealed the tires nice and loud.

 

**2\. The Right Man for the Job: Matching Skill Sets to Job Requirements in a Dynamic Environment**

Sam was relieved to find that Dean's idea of loading up on supplies involved starting in a bar.

"You know, Dean," he said, after the first fortifying shot of tequila was slipping down his throat, "if you're going to be the brains of the operation, I should get to take over the fornication duties."

"Oh yeah, Sammy? I'd love to see your pick-up technique."

"I think you already have, man—you just cut me off at the knees with that health club crack."

"Moron. I was just letting you know I'd noticed how well you filled out that obnoxious yellow shirt."

"Dean!"

"What? I didn't know you were my brother, I wasn't the one having creepy dreams. I thought you were just some guy. I have got eyes, Sam."

"Yeah?" Sam would willingly admit, to himself, that he had been trying to pick up Dean Smith and that he had noticed how well the self-important Mr. Smith filled out his power suits. He had eyes, too.

"So do I get to see you in action? We could find a better bar than this," Dean said, and he smirked over at Sam like he expected Sam to back down.

"We could do that, sure. What kind of bar you have in mind?" Sam watched Dean absorb his easy acceptance and quickly regroup. He was getting back in the game, using his head.

"Oh, I think a very, very gay bar, Sammy. I've seen you with women, and the puppy eyes is kind of nauseating. I want to see if you've got anything other than, _do I know you_, when you're working on a guy."

"I thought I _did_ know you, asshole. And it kind of turned out I was right, didn't it?"

"You're avoiding the issue. Challenge on the table, Sam, you in or do you fold?"

"I think I'll raise you, Dean." Sam said, letting the idea unfurl into his mind. If they were going to be together, fight together, then why the hell not go all the way? "Let's forget the bar, forget the challenge, and just cut out the middleman and find a motel."

Dean smiled slow and dirty, like that was the answer he'd been working toward all along. Yeah, manoeuvring was one of Dean's skills when he was assed to bother—when he was at the pool table or in a poker game. Zachariah and his gang wouldn't know what hit them.

"I think your guardian angel might not approve," he said.

"Just makes it sweeter. He wants me to be who I really am, Sammy. I think it's time he found out just what that is."

 

**3\. Putting it All Together: A Practical Guide to Building Team Cohesion**

Sam had let Dean go in to get them the motel room alone. He wanted to see if Dean was serious or not. Dean slid back into the car spinning a key ring on his finger and grinning like a maniac. "Lucky number seven, courtesy of Dean Smith."

"The card still worked?"

"You betcha."

Sam's phone rang, while Dean was rattling the key in the sticky lock. He pulled it out of his jeans pocket and thumbed it off. The door swung open on a room barely large enough to hold the single king-sized bed. Sam set his phone on top of the television. "Ruby," he said, turning to face Dean.

Dean had dumped their bags by the bed and was rocking on his heels, hands stuffed in his pockets. "You want to see what she wants?"

"She might know something useful." Dean pursed his lips, and Sam let himself look, openly, for the first time since he'd been all fucked up on angel dust. "Later's good enough for me," he said. Later would be soon enough for Sam to tell Dean just exactly what he'd been doing. Right now, he had other plans. "This is my show, Dean," he said, letting Dean hear just how much he meant it.

"You think so?"

"I do."

"All right, boss-man, where do you want me?"

Sam smiled, letting the hunger out a bit, and Dean flushed. The truthful answer was everywhere and every way and forever, but Sam figured later was soon enough for those words too. "Bed, naked."

Sam watched while Dean stripped. He made no move towards shucking more than his jacket. When Dean was done, he stood, eyeing Sam for a minute, hard and proud and letting Sam look his fill. He let Dean decide when they'd stared each other down for long enough. Dean dropped his gaze, didn't say anything, just posed himself on the bed, face down, the perfect picture of supplication.

Sam was tempted to leave him there and go take a shower, steam the last traces of Sandover out of his skin. He took his time getting out of his clothes, digging around in the very bottom of his bag for the things they'd need. He decided he'd made his point, no need to punish himself, after all.

He climbed on the bed, careful not to touch. A tremor ran down the length of Dean's body, and he wanted to set his hands to the pale skin, set him to trembling and shaking all over—get the juices flowing, indeed. "All clean and new, aren't you? Barely a mark on you. Think I should do something about that? Think I should put my mark on you?" He bent as close to Dean's pink-tipped ear as he could get and he wanted to set his tongue, his teeth to the very tip, where the skin was the most flushed. "Well, you're not getting off that easy," he said, voice a hard rasp of command and desire and simmering anger that wasn't going away any easier than it had been to bear all this time. "You think you can just lie there and take it and that'll be good enough? You think you can just give yourself up? You think it's going to be that simple?"

"Sam?" Dean said and he half rolled over and lifted his face, and Sam took his mouth and swallowed Dean's moans along with his confusion. He plundered Dean's mouth, and his lips were soft and giving, he was open, willing, and Sam was profoundly dissatisfied.

"You think I want the ass of Dean Winchester, offered up in sacrifice? I don't. Get up—up, you stupid bastard." Sam grabbed at Dean's arms and lifted, practically threw him up and pushed until he was on his knees facing Sam, chest pumping, skin flushed all over. He was showing a little fear, not too much, just the right amount, buried under a hot, flashy layer of annoyance.

"What the fuck, Sam?"

"_You_, are going to work for it. You are going to show me everything you've got, nothing held back, hear me?" Sam dropped back onto the bed, spreading his legs wantonly wide, dropped his voice to a low demanding growl. "I want to feel you, Dean, for days."

Sam watched the anger and fear and confusion transform into heat and intent and need in his brother's face. He watched lust and greedy desire light him up from the inside out. He watched him come back to life.

"Yeah, fuck yeah, Sammy. You won't know what hit you. Think you can take it?" Dean gave him the old, familiar considering stare, the one that had asked Sam to measure up for as long as he could remember. "Think you can handle me?"

"Let's find out, Dean. Let's find out how good you are," Sam said.


End file.
